Made In Our Image.

We remade the world. Now we need to remake ourselves.

The Garden of Eden, courtesy of AI.

People generally don’t like being told what to do. Or what not to do. The consequences of this particular human quirk were made clear in the allegory of the Garden of Eden, which, if memory serves, went something like this:

One morning, in the Garden…
God: “See that fruit?”
A&E: “Yeah.”
God: “Don’t eat it. If you do, you’ll know good and evil, and trust me, that’s nothin’ but trouble.”

Later that same day…
God: “Hey! What are you doing??”
A&E (Mouths full): “Uh…nuffing…”
God: “You know I can see you, right?”
A&E (Swallowing) “Oh, ok. but…listen…it’s not what you think…there was this snake, you see, and he says to us…”
God (Interrupting): “Yeah. I got it. Time to pack your bags.”

And so began, mythologically speaking, the human journey as we know it today. Generations upon generations of people unleashed into the world — no longer guided by pure instinct, capable of both good and evil, and pretty much free to do as they pleased. Just as long as they were willing to suffer the consequences.

That such freedom has an upside is clear — many helpful discoveries and inventions have come of it. Yay for that. As for all the things that have not been helpful, well…that was manageable for a while. Nature could absorb our misdeeds without being thrown too far out of whack. You might think of this as a kind of grace period.

But then our lack of self-imposed constraints started to cause trouble. The things we did got bigger and bolder and had more serious consequences. We started rerouting rivers, cutting down forests, scraping off topsoils, extincting species, and generally making the air, land and sea increasingly inhospitable to life. We threw nature out of balance and in the process did the same with our societies. We made war on each other, ultimately allowing those with the most advantages to grab even more advantages…stealing the resources of the many to satisfy the wants of the few.

Such an imbalance, of course, was destined to create disruption and conflict. So to protect their advantages, the “few” created systems and structures to force the rest of the world into compliance with the status quo. An unnatural and unsustainable stasis made possible only by a rigged economic system, self-serving laws, and the threat of violence so extreme it accepts Mutually Assured Destruction as a possible outcome. M.A.D. An acronym we all recognize as ironic, yet somehow fails to shock us into an awareness of our own insanity.

And so, what we have today is a world remade in our image — not the image of a people who lived harmoniously in the Garden, but the image of a people who’d been cast out of it. A people alienated from the unity of nature and of reality itself.

So what’s next? Having remade the world in a way that puts most, if not all, life at risk, our task now is to remake ourselves. The old mindset that created our unjust, unsustainable and unbalanced world does not have the perspective, understanding or wisdom necessary to set things right. It’s too constrained, too limited, and too controlled by the vested interests of the few. Relying on it would be like trying to stretch a small rubber band to do the job of a large one. Eventually the small one will snap under the stress.

Arguably, that snap has already occured. One indication among many is that people are increasingly discouraged with both the Republican and Democratic parties because neither has the flexibility to shift their thinking radically enough.

Fortunately, there’s another mindset with the elasticity we need to create a better future. It’s a mindset that acknowledges the unity of life, the laws of nature, and the necessity to follow those laws. It’s a mindset that’s guided not by the axiom “because I can, I will,” but by the clear-headed answer to the question: “Is what I’m thinking of doing good for me, good for life, and good for the future?” And, to ensure we answer that question with the wholeness of our being, it’s a mindset that tethers the rationality of the intellect to the compassion of the heart and the wisdom of the soul.

As to how this mindset emerges…it emerges through me, through you, and then, with power, through us working together. It emerges when we listen to the still, small voice within, and follow its guidance. It emerges when, having experienced the outcomes of doing both what’s good and what’s harmful for life, we commit ourselves to doing only what’s good.

Of course, doing what’s good for life in a given situation won’t always be easy to determine. There’s much mayhem to untangle in this remade world of ours, many holes out of which we need to dig ourselves. But if we set about it with the right intentions and the right mindset, we might discover the power that comes with aligning ourselves with life’s flow, rather than against it. Such a power may not produce miracles, but it might produce things that look an awful lot like them.